lauralh | Driving though OR and CA (Reply)

All pictures here. Some in the entry.

Driving to San Francisco is cheaper than flying, certainly, for more than one person. Even this weekend I spend under $300 on gas. Even solo I think I might have spent more than that on a Virgin ticket.

Wall anyhoo. Reg started the driving just after 10am, and as usual the traffic on I-5 south was ridiculous till you got to Olympia. This is about 65 miles from Seattle, and the capitol of Washington, so I can only assume that there are weirdos who live in Seattle and commute to their government jobs in Olympia. I cannot conceive of this, as I have just moved to Bellevue to be closer to my job. I also don't care much about politics, since nothing I care about is being addressed.

Such as the extremely low speed limits in Oregon. I don't get this. In WA and CA, on a nice stretch of interstate, the speed limit is 70. Which is great, I love cruising at 77mph. It's a good speed, doesn't burn too much gas (we averaged around 400mpt), and when the speed limit is 70, you still get people passing you. So that's great. Whereas in Oregon, the fastest you can legally go ANYWHERE is 65mph. Now, people are still going 75mph, but not as many. A ticket for 5 over is not the same as a ticket for 15 over, right? That's fairly standard, right? So there are a significant number of people who don't go over the speed limit at all. This wasn't as widespread on I-5, fortunately. It was fairly easy to go 70mph on the long stretches, even when it was only 2 lanes. And of course you can always burn some gas on the uphill truck lanes to pass old farts.

Reg fell asleep when I put on Girl Talk's All Day, which I had stuck in my head thanks to perich. That got me through the worst of Oregon, all the way to Grant's Pass. We didn't switch again till the first rest stop in California, mainly because of an accident. Also, construction. MOTHER FUCKING INTERSTATE FIVE DOWN TO ONE LANE EACH WAY. During a summer Friday. You can't do this shit at night, assholes?

Oh yeah, driving on I-5 in August - I'd never done this before, and for the first time I hit the highest point on I-5 (Siskiyou Summit, 4310ft) and could see things. Including a big ol' thunderhead and Mount Shasta! (Reg had switched back in CA.) And it was hot, so hot, and we don't have a working air conditioner in our car right now. 105F baybe. It was only 90F in the car probably, but still. We were feeling rather crazed, Reg was hitting 100mph while we blasted New Order - as long as we weren't hitting the stupid fucking one lane restrictions. But going around tight mountain curves and weaving in and out of traffic with 3ft between you and big ass semis is something that typically makes me nervous. By the time we stopped for gas in Red Bluff, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Instead I had a cigarette and took lots of pictures of the sunset.

Boy, if I thought Reg was going fast BEFORE sunset... (see the blur?)

But of course that last stretch, when you get onto the highway bypassing Sacramento and going by Vacaville, is insanely long and boring. I mean, oh my God, long long long. We blasted "Blinded by the Light" and "Nobody 'Cept You", then "The '59 Sound" since we hadn't cried enough. (I am not ashamed that these songs make me tear up. Reg mentioned our friend Jeremy and I just lost it.) We kept thinking the city lights we were seeing were SF, but no. I got super excited when I saw a carpool lane, though. "STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE!" I announced to Reg.

The toll on the bridge was $6, and it was so horribly inefficient. For those of you who don't live around here, there are two bridges to Seattle, I-90 and SR-520. They turned the latter into a toll road, but it took an extra year to get a "fast track" system for ALL cars. That is to say, if you don't have the pass (here it's called Good To Go!), they just send you a bill after a few trips. There's little cameras, you see, that take a picture of the front of your car if you don't have the special pass. Either way, there's no stopping, no booths, no difference between the old bridge and the new bridge, except you can see a sort of purple light as you approach the eastside/leave Evergreen Point.

Whereas in SF - and probably every other expensive toll bridge where you can't just throw change into a basket - you have to stop and wait for the guy to walk across to another booth to GET CHANGE. Because obviously at 9pm on a FRIDAY NIGHT no one will be going into SF without exact change! For fuck's sake, California. Stay classy.

Blargh. Finally off 80 and onto US 101, which you almost immediately get off to turn onto Valencia. Friday night traffic was abysmal, of course. Took us forever to get off 101. I was texting Steve like mad, all excited to see him. He warned us that his street specifically might be a hassle, since Mr. Woody Allen is filming a couple of scenes there for his new movie. Not the whole film, mind, just a few scenes. Parking was nonexistant, so after we blocked a driveway unloading our crap, I paid a nice foreign gentleman to park the car for the night. He charged us more than he charged Ry, but what can you do? It's a vacation, and we had free rooms.

Steve's new townhouse (thanks to the largess of his mother) is amazing. Legitimately a hundred years old, three stories - they rent the second one to pay for most of the mortgage. When we got there, just before 11pm, the kids were asleep so we just put our stuff on the couch, put on warmer clothes (it was forty degrees cooler, no shit) and went out for a couple drinks and food. We stopped at the Phoenix - great burgers, but super crowded, unsurprisingly. We then stopped at the Hideout, which sort of reminded me of the Hideout in Seattle, but without art. (I almost never leave the Mission when I'm with Steve.)

By then it was almost 1am, and we were all exhausted. Thus ended day one.